


You'll Still Be There When You Leave

by Zabbers



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Episode AU: s10e12 The Doctor Falls, Episode Fix-it: s10e12 The Doctor Falls, F/M, Self-Harm, and consequently the maturity rating, and upped the angst, but also there's a bath bomb, but there's sex too, for certain values of fix, look basically I took everything about the Masters interactions in TDF, maybe more like
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-20
Updated: 2018-06-20
Packaged: 2019-05-25 21:36:48
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,402
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14986121
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zabbers/pseuds/Zabbers
Summary: What if, instead of stabbing themselves in the back, they had taken that lift to their TARDIS?





	You'll Still Be There When You Leave

There's an image: a woman running through a wood. She’s running from something. She’s afraid. The only sounds are her breath and the bracken snapping underfoot. She’s running from someone, maybe a man.

Time Lords, for many reasons, don’t have such an image. So when Missy runs through the wood, she could just be running. There is someone, though, someone she’s running to. She’s running away, too, but she’s been doing that since long before the wood, and only from herself.

The wood is burning. In the distance, there are explosions, lurid, disproportionate plumes rising high above the trees. Everywhere, the steady, pumping exhalation of pneumatic legs and the rhythmic impact of metal feet, an army of tremors across the rockbed. Missy’s urgent travel towards the source of the explosions is broken only by her need to stop and hide and avoid the cyber army sweeping the landscape for organic combatants.

By the time she pushes through the vinelike copse, there are Cybermen littered, charred, all around the clearing. The Doctor’s voice is an enduring mutter just out of hearing, guiding Missy’s way--guiding, too, the endless companies of tin soldiers that converge on him, ten for every one he manages to disable. Missy catches sight of the black coat, the flash of red like a blackbird’s coloration when he springs across a log, screwdriver raised as a baton.

“...the moon!” he says, pointing at the sky, and a Mondasian-model Cyberman behind him reaches for its weapons panel. 

A Time Lord can be quick, and Missy is quick for a Time Lord. She’s between the Doctor and the deadly ray, even as the Cyberman bends to brace against the kickback of its head gun.

She slips her hand into the Doctor’s, back against his back, fingers interlaced.

She looks the Cyberman in the face. Its eyes are hollows but its nose and mouth are clear beneath the latex mask.

She gasps as the heat shoves into her, as its radiation slices into her torso and sets the future into motion.

Behind her, the Doctor shouts. She can’t understand what he’s shouting. But his hand in her hand holds tight; he isn’t letting go. She fumbles with the laser screwdriver. He spins her around, out of the way. She raises her hand, aiming the weapon, returns matching hot fire at Cyberman after Cyberman. 

Then the shriek of the Mondasian weapon again, and heat, and the Doctor’s rattling inhale, and pain, pain, but she doesn’t know if it’s coming from her own body or if it’s the disrupted spasming of the Doctor’s hearts, and the Mondasian fires again, the beam like a knife, and the Doctor drops to his knees. Missy, reaching across his back to catch him, falls with him, out of strength but firing at the inexorable army, still, to keep their foe at bay.

The Doctor’s coming apart at the seams. He’s a planet, crust grinding down out of the way over a molten core. He looks at her askance. His expression is full of sorrow, and also wonder, and mirth. They’re in this together. She nods back at him, committed, maybe even exhilarated. He looks down at the hands they’re holding, and she follows his gaze to discover that hers, too, is evanescing into the portentous magma.

No, she won't stand with the Doctor, not for long, but this is the next best thing, the easier thing--she can do this, she knows. He lifts his sonic to the sky; she wraps her hand around his. Together, they trigger the explosion.

 

It almost doesn’t happen this way. She almost loses herself, elsewhere in the wood. But it hurts so much to betray that callow, trusting version of herself, the one not yet beset by ambiguity, so breathtakingly sure. She has the plan ready, the knife primed, dipped in treachery. Her grief must have shown--even for a moment--because he hesitates, walking into her embrace, and turns back for the inertia lift instead.

So she follows him, not knowing until after they’d snuck through the decaying city if she’s biding her time or giving in, not knowing until they’ve tumbled into his TARDIS and slammed shut his doors, until, in the quiet of his control room, she watches him install her dematerialisation circuit and realises she’d meant to take it for herself, to go back for the Doctor and defeat the Cybermen, dragging him into the time capsule if she had to, to escape his stupid, ill-advised test and never again. Never again, not like that. 

Over by the console, the Master hesitates. 

“You drive,” he says. His voice is reluctant, but his face--actually, his face is reluctant too. Grudging. But he steps away from the controls; he gives her space. 

She could take them back to the solar farm. She could do it, she thinks, with the freshly installed component, with the Master’s up-to-date ship, his cutting-edge war machine recovered from Gallifrey, and with the patience she’s trained back into her body. No--not with him watching her so closely. He’d see, he’d try to stop her; they’d both wind up sucked into the black hole, beating up against the event horizon, forever. Instead, she inputs her commands in great detail, double checks them, triple checks, before executing the sequence. She uses her patience to bite back the need to get away, as quick as she can, to run. 

They materialise in orbit of a peaceful planet, so calm after the colony ship it feels like a lid has been lifted from a pressure cooker and they’re floating in a fog of steam.

 _Don’t fence me in!_ , the Master whistles. He bustles around the console room in great cheer, affecting to straighten a space that, even in a panic, he’s left meticulously neat (though there’s little enough to make a mess of). In this pristine, familiar, unnerving environment, Missy feels suddenly filthy. She brushes her hands over her skirt, touches her frizzy hair. 

“Uck,” she says, “two weeks in a farmhouse full of humans! It’s time for a bath.”

The Master looks up with interest. “I’ll join you.” He needs it--Missy is remembering just how long it’s been since he’s washed with more than the water he could boil up in a teakettle. Time Lords are naturally dirt-proof, but even catlike cleanliness has a limit. Missy would rather not sit in a tub with everything that’s going to come off of him, but…

If she demurs, he’s going to think it’s him she finds distasteful, and then he’ll know…

There are advantages to being in _their_ TARDIS. It’s pleasant knowing where the bath bombs are kept, and not having to wonder whether the spa has been ejected in the most recent emergency (they would never). As Missy enters the tastefully minimalist room, it fills her with a sense of profound ease to rest her eyes on the dark fixtures, to breathe air whose makeup is Gallifreyan, not Terran. And then, such satisfaction, to lower herself into water whose temperature is perfectly comfortable, just how they like it.

No one’s clothes are strewn all over the glittering mosaic at their feet.

Missy watches her younger self prepare for the bath. She’d known he was watching her undress, though she carefully hadn’t taken note at the time. She evaluates his skin, his muscle tone, making an inventory as when looking in a mirror. They’ve always been compact--this particular body in a lean but blunt way, slight without being vulnerable. She was a man for so long, but now that she’s a woman, it takes effort to recall what it felt like to stop in the places he stops, not to be soft in the places she’s soft. 

An image comes to her mind, sudden and vivid: her own body just a moment ago, standing by the bath, about to get in. She lifts her leg, dips a foot into the water, her gluteus muscle working, the sinews of the underside of her thigh, her downiness. Along with the image, there is the memory of something between a request and a whinge. He wants to touch her. Well, _yes_ , she _knows_ , just looking at him!

“Rinse yourself first,” she tells him, so he does, lathering extravagantly before releasing great streams of clean water over his shoulders. He shakes himself like a dog, grinning, before joining her in the tub. His mass displaces the water to lap against her chest and arms. The water is rich with perfume and oil, translucent tracery that laces their skin.

“Come here,” he says to her. She experiences a frisson of doubt. Does he know, has he known all along? He gestures to her, arm outstretched, as she did outside the lift. He knows her better than anyone. How hard would it be for him to figure it out?

Then again, they always were terrible at gauging their allies.

Suppressing the fear, Missy drifts over to the Master’s side of the tub, turning as she does to position herself in his lap, her back fitting into the cave of his chest all too well. She’s let down her hair, and it floats in the water like mermaid hair (delicious creatures), kelp-dark and long. He runs his fingers through it, his touch gentle, surprisingly meticulous with the knots.

“Why” --she sighs at his question-- “so _much_ hair? It isn’t exactly efficient.”

“Why a goatee?” she quips in return. “Why do we wear eyeliner? The hearts want what the hearts want.”

“Lean back.”

Missy allows the Master to cradle her head and dip it into the water, pasting her hair to her scalp. He strokes her forehead as she stares up at him, her pupils shrinking to pinholes in response to the light overhead, emphasising the startling paleness of her eyes. 

She sits up, closing them to cut off the memory.

“Now, will you kiss me?” he asks.

All of a sudden, she doesn’t mind, a startling realisation. She twists around to press her lips against his. It isn’t unexpected; didn’t her lips feel like tender extensions of himself? 

She settles against him again, uninterested in kissing him for long, and he reaches for her breast. This, too, seems to be fine. Everything is fine now that she’s decided whose side she’s on (her own, allied, because it finally makes sense, with the Doctor’s); she can indulge a little now. It’s in the spirit of indulgence that she wriggles her arse. Thumb and forefinger rubbing and pinching her with just enough pressure to hover on the edge of discomfort, he’s having a decent guess at how she might like to be touched, as though he’s the one who is remembering _her_.

Time, time is eddying back and forth in the wash between them, a bit of bathwater borrowed from the flow. Missy looks down at their bare legs, one pair bracketing the other, and wonders without real concern which ones are hers, which ones came first, what first is. When they push themselves into one another, it is unclear--and it doesn’t much matter--which body possesses the bath-slick cock, which the relaxed, squeezing arse. And to ask, to say that Missy is revisiting her past or that the Master is glimpsing his future, would be a non-sequitur. 

They _are_.

In the absence of the usual signifiers, his erection quickly loses its urgency, and they pull apart, Missy turning the Master around to give him a good scrubbing. They help each other out of the tub. The Master’s dressing gowns are spare and slinky; silk, where once they might have chosen velvet, might again, in a future not very far away. Dressed to match, the Master and the Master make their indolent way through their TARDIS, their steps sure, synchronous beats.

He brushes her hair while she moisturises her skin. She allows the edge of her robe to slip from her thigh so they can admire the athletic suppleness of her own limbs. 

“He isn’t wrong, you know,” she says. The brush sweeps steadily from the crown of her head, over and over and over.

“Of course he is.”

 _How can you be so sure?_ she wants to ask. Here is one thing she’s unable to remember. She cranes her neck to look at him, and he smiles at her as though to reassure her. His confidence is unquestionable, luminous. She wants to swallow it, his face, take all that force back inside herself to fill the terrified spaces. 

“I know you,” she says.

She means, _I understand you_. She means, _I miss you_. She does not mean, _I can reclaim the psychological reality of being you_.

But she wants to be him again, never mind the anger, the pulsing, full-on pain of being him. They could stay like this. If she doesn’t kill him, he won’t become her. She could keep him safe. She’s hollow enough; he would fit easily, if she could split herself open as he had done, when his body was trying to tear itself apart.

He’s waiting, brush in hand, but she doesn’t know how to find the hinge again.

She takes the brush from him and she throws it away from them, hard enough for the crack of the wooden handle to come back as a brittle echo. She gets up high on her knees on the seat of the chair and reaches over its back for the lapels of his robe, pulling him to her. She kisses him the way he kissed, the way she did too, not so very long ago, all open mouths and closed eyes, except now she stares at his skin, as close as she can get to it, like zooming in on the patchwork of cells and pores. 

The initial contact is full of sensation, swelling as the memory catches up with her, the feeling on his lips chasing the feeling of his lips, overlapping, crashing. Everywhere he touches her is the memory of fire. The memory of being him. 

He circles a hand around her wrist, and his hand around her wrist is cruel. When she feels, she feels the pressure of his palm against her skin but she also feels the fine structure of her bones beneath his fingers. There’s a lag in this restoration of time: it takes a heartsbeat for her senses to catch up. It is in that space, only in that space, that she is alone. 

Then he's inside her head, too, every moment he touches her skin with his. The constriction around her wrists is also a pushing against her skull. He’s the self the most recent and the most distant; he’s angry angry angry, rage and disappointment and resentment and passion; he feels so much. He feels everything, and it's all so much kindling and combustion, distorted with heat, overwhelming.

Abruptly one of them cuts out and she is just _he_ , and they’re two experiencing the reality of one, kissing and grasping someone who doesn’t exist, a paper outline, a mouthful of empty air, an ion in a lattice trap.

_I am the Master!_

She scrambles to her feet in what would be a panic, the vestiges of her scrabbling at him from the enhanced height of the chair, climbing over it. She’s tugging at the knots in the sashes of their robes to get to him, climbing him, clinging to him, hanging from him.

“Do it, do it” --her weight in his arms is all she can feel, the sole evidence of her body--there’s no dignity here, but there’s no one else here to see. She wraps her legs around his waist and he tilts her onto his cock, which is so very much better than _not being_ that it is like real pleasure.

Solace. The weightlessness leaving her, pneumatic.

Slowly, slowly, the present returns to her; gradually, she comes to have a body into which her past self is thrusting. Last comes the awareness that this body, that _she_ is enjoying the sensation, the wet friction and the rhythmic pressure.

Most of all there is the relief, her heartsbeat calming even as it speeds with her shallowing breath.

She’s been trying not to think about the knife. It ought to be easy because she’s spent decades not thinking about that knife, but somehow the reassuring resistance of it keeps coming to mind, so long has that extra bone rested against her forearm, built into her sleeve like the armoured corsetry around her vulnerable organs. She’s trying, now that she has a place in her mind again, not to imagine scraping the tip across the flexed flank of her other’s body, etching a curved red diagonal from armpit to navel, fine as wire. 

She traces the soft flesh below his ribs, reminding herself of the inviolability of the body, or the necessary illusion of it, especially when the mind is so porous, especially when he’s so far inside her.

He mimics the gesture, the pads of his fingers on her stomach, dipping and trailing to her clitoris and the root that connects them--it’s both their pleasures in this nexus of sensation and will--she’s shed the illusion of being separate for which she struggled so diligently on the farm. She’s sucked the poison out of the wound, tied a tourniquet over that part of herself. All she has to do is keep one thing from him. The risk is nothing against the ecstasy of feeling again, of freedom again, of confidence.

She rides his conviction like a passion; touching his mind is fire and it’s fine (as though there is a choice anymore). She accepts this, lets it carry her into the blood and the pulsing and the white, percussive echo as their bodies release themselves together, endlessly, time after time after time.

It is the end of choice, and when he sets her down, breathing the absence away, she knows how to do what she has to do. 

 

“You suffer,” she says.

“We’ve always suffered.” He’s languid, but she’s going to make this change in a moment.

“Not like this. You thought it would end, this suffering. When the drums--”

“--Do you remember falling to your knees, Lord Rassilon collapsed before you, the Time Lord Council, all of Gallifrey watching, crying out, condemning you? Do you remember what they did after that?”

“You were bewildered when they took the drums away.”

The Master sits up, angry or alert. “You remember. You were relieved.”

“They left your damaged body untouched, the way _he_ left you behind.” She does remember. “They wouldn’t even give you a change of clothes.”

Then he’s sad, as suddenly, looking into a distant self. “They helped Lord Rassilon regenerate.”

“They forgot about you.”

“They had no more need of you. They were disappointed in you. They had nothing to fear from you.”

“They sent you home. You lay in the once-lost grass. You lay there so long you wondered if you had become the grass.”

“You listened for the rhythm.”

“The rhythm was gone.”

“It still hurt.”

“You can make it stop hurting.” This is the ploy. This is the strategem. This is the reasoning with which Missy will guide herself to the knife. 

“I got better.” The Master peers at her, and Missy wonders if she’s misstepped, if this is too soon. But now she’s made her move, she must complete the maneuver, or she’ll lose her way again.

She says what she could not have imagined saying. “You can do what’s right.”

The Master scoffs. “What, the kind thing? The good thing?”

“ _No_.” Missy almost stamps her foot. “No, the inevitable thing. The thing we know must be. The timelines--”

“They can wait.”

“I don’t remember waiting.”

“You said the regeneration was ‘hazy’.” The Master sounds so injured that Missy aches for him. She greets for him, she could tear her hair for him. She tells the truth for him.

“The longer we’re together, the more I forget myself. If we go on like this, you’ll have no future at all.”

In the quiet she thinks about the hours she’s spent, silent and still, the Doctor on the other side of a sealed door.

“You let him keep you.” 

It’s more than an accusation. It is beyond, even, recrimination. In the voice and on the visage of her former self, Missy sees simple incomprehension, perhaps incredulity, definitely a great deal of disdain. She knows very well why--

Defiance, she’s recalling, defines him. It’s a stick beating at his calves. 

“I’d rather die than be like you,” he says, though without real acrimony.

“You’ll die _and_ be like me.” She strokes his face because she knows he’s not really resisting, not anymore. “I’ve let you in my head. You’ve felt what it’s like to be me. Don’t tell me it isn’t seductive.”

He closes his eyes. “I want to rest, but I don’t want to stop.”

She walks soft fingers over his eyelids. “You don’t have to. Trust me. You’ll see.”

He tilts his head back, frowning with his eyes closed. “He trusts you. Why?”

He _will_ see, but it’ll take many years, and by then it’ll be so late.

“Because he wants to. Because he always has. You can make it happen. We can. I can.”

 

She finds the knife still in its sheath. She leaves her jacket where it is, neat on its hook. They’re half dressed, and the Master pauses, fastening his trousers, when she turns back to lay it across the table by his feet.

They look at it together. He swallows.

“You pick it up,” he says, finally.

She reaches for its short hilt, adjusting her fingers around it until they settle into a grip that doesn’t feel quite so wrong.

“You’ll stand with him?” The Master can’t help but sneer, even through his resignation.

Missy exhales a little, almost laughing. It’s incredulity--in a way, she’s still noncommittal; in a way, it isn’t possible for her to believe in this thing that she’s done and soon will do, after all the waiting and the locked door and the not knowing.

He brushes his fingers over the edge of the blade, stroking a taut string, so sensitive they cock their heads to hear the vibration.

Maybe she won’t ever stand with him. But for the first time, Missy articulates what she will do. What she must--and has chosen to--do. “Kindness, as he means it, won’t be possible, but...there’s a utility in the minimisation of suffering.”

“You’ll make that calculation.”

“Difficult, I know…”

The Master runs his fingers over the blade again. This time, he applies pressure, pushing down, slicing himself open, savage. Missy feels the resistance and the weight through her wrist, but she feels it, too, through the connection that hasn’t faded between them, a field of awareness that isn’t memory and isn’t telepathy, but both. There’s no return, now, as the neurotoxin courses through him, acrid and boiling, but they’re not willing to admit it yet.

“Do you...regret?”

The Master’s voice is rough already, but yearning, and Missy’s catches as she tells him the simple certainty that she will always miss being him.

How it fills her with him, to hear her say it, how it fills him with relief and strength and sorrow!

Missy grips the knife. She braces her hips and points the fierce tip. The Master reaches for her and pulls them to each other as they did in the woods; at last; he lets his weight fall and his body open on the sharp point, the eviscerating edges pushing into him. More than anything, she wants to drop the knife and catch him, but it’s inside her, and he’s inside her, and her arms shake, and her stance holds. This is the calculation she’s made.

The Master’s guts pulse around the knife. Missy’s hand is hot and slick. Everything is wrong. Everything hurts. She reaches to support him with the other, propping him below the armpit, but he throws himself back so that she has to cling to him, her mind mermaid fingers, sea grass tangles. She can’t let him go.

But it’ll run her mad, filling her current form with the former’s pain like this. It can’t go on--

It is his thought that saves her.

He grips the shaft of the blade where it protrudes from his belly. He wraps another hand over hers. He forces their fists up, up, to the place below his sternum where the bullet went in, once. They’re face to face, forehead to forehead, eyes and mouths wide with exertion and exhortation, shouting being into each other’s minds. It doesn’t matter what happens now. She’ll always see herself like this--fervid, fevered, incandescent. His fingers over hers.

He releases her to slap the flats of his palms on her shoulders, shoving her away. She’s the one who falls to her knees as he flings his arms wide, the regeneration taking hold. He’s screaming as he did when he came into being, running through a life of agony aflame, unrepentant and uncompromising, and he’s molten now. He’s gold slag. He’s burned out of her. He’ll always burn in her. He’s a sun; he’s a cosmic reactor blazing in the void, this light. Their light.

And then he’s gone.

 

Missy picks herself up--she’s heavier than she looks, angelic in her post-regenerative trauma--and washes her body clean, dipping her, face-up, into baptismal bathwater, quenching her for strength and hardening. She dries and brushes her hair. She dresses herself in the layers and the constrictions that will contain her when she wakes to her new self. 

She’s relieved she won’t have to look herself in the eyes.

She leaves her behind insensate and immaculate with a vortex manipulator around her wrist and a void in her memory while she flies her TARDIS back into the black hole. Back to the solar farm and back to the Doctor and his losing battle, and to whatever happens now, back to back and hand in hand. 

This is an image that she has chosen: 

Missy runs through the woods. She runs to the pain. She runs against the impossible odds and away from herself, for the memory of the blast and the certainty of the knife in the hand. And she runs unafraid, for the first time, towards the inevitable calculation.


End file.
